Marathon Season 2 goes free for a week as Bungie fights a 71% player collapse

Marathon is free to play on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Steam through June 9, 2026, and Bungie needs the boost. The extraction shooter launched in March with critical praise but shed 71% of its Steam player base within weeks — dropping from an 88,000-player peak to roughly 25,000 concurrent by early June. Season 2, called Nightfall, is the studio's most aggressive attempt yet to reverse that slide.

The new season

Nightfall's centerpiece is Night Marsh, a horror-tinged, nighttime reimagining of the existing Dire Marsh map. Alongside it comes the Sentinel shell (a new playable character), two new weapons — the KKV SMG and D54 pistol — and the Cradle, a fresh system for customising your shell's stats. Faction progression speeds up, and a round of quality-of-life fixes addresses complaints that the game is too punishing for newcomers.

The headline move is the first full seasonal progression wipe in the game's history. Gear, faction ranks, and vault contents reset to zero — cosmetics and achievements survive, but nothing else carries over. It's a drastic call, and one that signals Bungie knows the current player economy isn't working.

The PvE pivot

The bigger structural bet is on PvE. A mode called Sponsored Survival launched alongside Season 2, with a fuller PvE experience planned for mid-season. This matters because Marathon's player retention crisis is, in part, a genre problem: extraction shooters are brutally competitive, and TechRadar reports that game director Joe Ziegler has acknowledged the core loop feels too isolating for most players. PvE would give casual players somewhere to learn the game without getting repeatedly wiped by experienced squads.

The free week is the delivery mechanism for all of this — but it hit a snag on day one. Servers went down on June 2, the same day as a PlayStation State of Play, turning a visibility opportunity into a PR headache. The situation stabilised, and the game is now accessible, but the timing was poor for a studio already under pressure.

What it costs

The full game carries a $40 price tag, with a 30% Steam discount active right now. PC players can dive in without any subscription. Console players, however, need PS Plus or Xbox Game Pass Core even during the free week — a paywall that cuts against the "try it free" message.

According to tbreak citing Forbes, Marathon cost more than $250 million to develop — against estimated revenue of around $55 million from 1.2 million copies sold. That gap explains why Sony and Bungie are pulling every lever available. Whether a map, a wipe, and a PvE experiment is enough to turn things around remains the open question.